Michael Cottam's Blog

Monday, February 21, 2022

TORO DDCWP-4 Sprinkler Controller Troubleshooting

You can find the manual for these annoying, badly-designed beasts all over the internet. What you CAN'T find is the following "gotchas" that are either not explained at all, or badly explained in the manual.

Numbering

The controller has 4 stations (plus a master valve and pump control). Seasonality settings are 1 to 12 - these are months. Start times are not per station--it's per cycle, and you have up to 3 cycles available. So you can run your program A three different times in a day.

Off is not = Off

For most dial settings, to turn something off, you don't just turn the number down to 0. You need to press both ON/+ and OFF/- simultaneously, for several seconds.

Off is only temporarily off

Let's say you start Program A with the Manual Program dial setting, to make sure all the sprinklers kick on. All good, and you want to shut it off...so you turn the dial to Off. The sprinklers go off. So far, so good, right? So you turn the dial to Auto Run, and the sprinklers come on even though they're not supposed to at this time. Go back to Manual Program, and turn that off by pressing ON/+ and OFF/- simultaneously.

Seasonality

When you set seasonality override percentages, you'll see a display like: 1:10 The first number represents the month. The second number represents the percentage of the normal run time for all stations, but it's missing a 0 at the end. So, if you cycle the display through the months and stop at April, and it says 4:15, that means for the month of April, if your run time is set to 30 minutes, it'll water 150% of that, i.e. 45 minutes in April.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Tahiti Destination Weddings

We just launched this guide to getting married in Tahiti on Visual Itineraries. In it, you'll find the list of all the rules and regulations for a legal ceremony: sample documents (including a form letter you need to send to the mayor...really!), timeline requirements, etc.; a list of considerations for choosing which island to get married on, and a complete list of all destination wedding packages offered by the resorts in French Polynesia.